Incurably Sceptical

In this section I rifle through the recent cognitive psychology literature and pick out a paper which looks interesting to me based on the abstract alone. I then proceed to examine the authors’ aims, methodology, analysis and interpretation. Hopefully along the way we will not only learn a little about the topic of the paper, but, in appraising it with a critical eye, perhaps also derive some lessons about the scientific method.

Importantly, these are not ‘bad’ papers. Indeed, unless papers I find interesting are more likely to be bad (maybe), they should be representative of the standard of papers being published in the main cognitive psychology journals at the moment.